You can migrate your data relatively easily – and if you want your note taking app to work for project management, you really should.

Keeping up with your to-do list isn’t productivity: it’s getting by. That’s why you need a place to keep track of long term goals and projects, which you can review every morning before deciding what to put on your to-do list. For a longtime Evernote was that database for me, but I’d usually end up making a list of longterm goals only to forget to check it later.

Switching to Microsoft OneNote changed that for me. Here’s why I think that is, and how you can migrate your old notes if you end up agreeing with me.

Why OneNote Over Evernote?

If you’re an Evernote user who thinks the entire premise of this article is blasphemy, I understand: I was on your side just a few weeks ago. But since making the switch, and migrating all of my notes over, I just feel more on top of things.

For years I’ve been trying to use Evernote to plan my longterm goals and projects. It’s an important compliment to my to-do list, which by nature is focused on the short term. At several different points I tried to outline my longterm projects in Evernote, only to forget to check back later and actually follow through with them.

OneNote changed that for me, and I think a lot of the reasons for that have to do with organization. Put simply, OneNote lets me organize things however I want – and makes it easier to prioritize what I’m currently working on.

Tabs are awesome, and OneNote is built around them. Rather than having every notebook be just a list of notes, OneNote lets you break notebooks down into sub-tabs. This is perfect for brainstorming – I use it for compiling article ideas, as seen above. Whereas before I’d have an “article ideas” notebook, filled with ideas for every section on the site, now I have a neatly sorted series of tabs. It makes a big difference.

Only one notebook is open at a time, meaning I’m not seeing my weekend home improvements projects list in the sidebar when I should be focusing on writing. It’s a small thing, sure, but it helps a lot with focus.

Formatting works just like in Word, meaning it’s familiar to most computer users.

OneNote functions like a paper notepad. This really sets it apart from Evernote, which treats notes linearly. OneNote lets you jot things all over the document, in separate text boxes, as well as move images and attachments around. It’s more free-flowing, which is messy but frequently effective.

Evernote keeps asking for money, in a way that’s starting to feel intrusive. Sure, I could just start paying for the service, but in my opinion they aren’t offering much I care about outside of getting rid of these intrusions. If you’ve already paid for Office, you don’t need to worry about Microsoft doing the same thing to you – but currently they’re not doing this to free users either.

If any of this sounds good to you, I recommend downloading OneNote and trying it out as a way to plan your longterm projects. If you like how it works, you can migrate your old notes.

What You Need to Migrate from Evernote to OneNote

If you’re like me, you’ve got a few massive backlogs of notes that you’d like to keep. The application Evernote2OneNote can help you by migrating the contents of any Evernote notebook to your default notebook in OneNote, from where you can move the notes wherever you like. To use this, you will need:

.NET Framework 4.6 – if you use an earlier version, Evernote2OneNote will crash.

Once you have all of this set up, it’s time to do the actual migration.

How to Migrate All of Your Notebooks

Launch Evernote2OneNote, which ships as a portable application, and you should see a simple window.

Pick which Evernote notebook you’d like to migrate from the dropdown menu, then click “Migrate”. The process will be fast; so fast you might suspect nothing happened, so head to OneNote to confirm. Your migrated notes will show up in the default section (typically “Quick Notes”) of your default notebook (Typically “YourName’s Notebook”).

Take some time to go through your notes – everything should look just the same as it did in Evernote, including all attachments.

There’s a good chance you don’t actually want your migrated notes to live in your default section, but it’s simple enough to move them. Just create a section where you’d like them to live, in any OneNote notebook. Once that’s done, select the notes you’d like to migrate (hold Shift, then click the first and last note from the migration). Right-click the selected notes, then click Move or Copy:

You can now browse all of your notebooks and sections – pick where you’d like to put your migrated notes.

Just pick the section you created for this content. You’ll need to repeat the process for all of your notes, which obviously isn’t ideal, but it’s a lot easier than copying-and-pasting everything.

My personal Evernote backlog, from about 5 years of near-constant use, took about 20 minutes to migrate using these steps, but your mileage may vary – especially if you have many different individual notebooks in Evernote that need migrating to unique sections in OneNote.

But the joy of tech is discovering new tools, so let me know: which note taking app haven’t I looked into? Or what sort of tools do you use for project management? Let’s share tips in the comments below, okay?

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment

Name *

Email *

Olo

May 3, 2018 at 9:28 am

Good point, especially is Microsoft announced not to develop OneNote any further. With Office 2019 (to be launched 2nd half of 2018) OneNote will not be distributed any longer. Support for existing OneNote 2016 installations will end around 2020.

I was on-board with you right up until "Formatting works just like in Word..." I simply do not want this to be Word: the whole point is to be light & simple. When writing in Word, I spent too much of my time fighting the tool rather than writing. Looking for another alternative.

I did try to switch to Onenote after reading tons of article showcasing many of its cool features, but after 1 weeks I deleted it from my macbook for these following reasons:
1. Onenote and Microsoft office software crash A LOT on OSX, daily frequency and as a Mac user who got used to the rarely crashing system, I felt extremely annoying. Sometimes it breaks the work flow terribly when I'm working very seriously on recording my thought from my brain.
2. Onenote offers exporting to pdf and other more global formats but ONLY ONE PAGE at one time, so if you organize all kinds of tabs, each tabs you throw bunches of different pages corresponding to separate sub-themes, you will feel that in the end, the amount of effort you put into for organizing just like a book will STAY ONLY IN ONENOTE. If people you share to want to read the exact organization of your digital notebook, they will have to install Onenote, which is heavy at least 3 or 4 times (not counting space in somewhere hidden in OSX library folder) compared to Evernote or a simple but efficient Notes.

I have been an Evernote Premium customer for YEARS. I want to switch to OneNote, mainly because the Evernote Add-In is breaking my Outlook. This is the second major update that has made that happen. It took about six months for them to fix the add-in the first time. It's been over six months now and they're still "looking into it". I need the functionality to add emails to Evernote/OneNote, but not at the expense of breaking basic functionality.

I tried using the (theoretically) revamped Evernote2OneNote importer, but it was a bit of a disaster. I don't really use tags, but I do use notebooks in notebook stacks - to be more specific, 5430 notes, 45 notebooks, 11 stacks.

The importer did import most notes - missing a few with multiple PDFs attached - but imported notebooks only. No hierarchy. It looks like a huge amount of work to get them reorganised.

So, the choice appears to be, stay with Evernote and forego one of the most useful (to me) tools, and now, pay more for the privilege. Or, I can go with OneNote and devote hours or days to reorganise before I'll even know if the reportedly inferior search and other functions are going to be usable for my needs.

I really wish I had discovered this last week when I decided to switch to OneNote from Evernote. I loved Springpad and transferred to Evernote when it ended. I have never been truly happy with Evernote and the last straw was the restriction on the number of times I could email with it--unless I wanted to pay to upgrade. I already paid for Microsoft Office 360 and as OneNote comes with that I decided to try it. I love it. It is so much easier than Evernote and I was able to easily move things (although in a much less streamlined way than what you describe).

I use Evernote at home, but OneNote is the available platform at work. I like OneNote better for generating content, and Evernote for archiving content. I also hugely appreciate the increased integration of Evernote with other apps and services, whether by native code or by more extensive options through IFTTT and Zapier than are available for OneNote.

My biggest worry right now is that Evernote is a one trick pony, and lately that pony has been looking more and more like an ailing tech startup unicorn. I got burned when Springpad folded up (as did Ms. Haugen, who also commented here). I worry that Evernote might head down that same road and leave me high and dry with over 3,000 painstakingly tagged and organized notes. Microsoft, though, is a more solid company, and I am less concerned that I might wake up one morning to find that my external brain is going dark. Cue the ensuing panic of realizing that I have 24 hours or a week or whatever to do something constructive with an enormous chunk of information.

I agree with your comments completely. I do know that Evernote does have quite a bit of financial backing, but I believe they need to show a level of growth and profits for the investors. Microsoft may be in a better financial position, but they can also suddenly choose to change direction with their technology and leave people high and dry.

I may undertake a "backup" of Evernote by following the process that is outlined here by Justin.

Thanks for the article - glad to know there are options if needed. I'm getting a feeling that Evernote (may) change some of their service offerings (change in pricing/features/storage...)

One of the larger benefits (that I fully leverage) in Evernote, is OCR of PDFs and actual images. Photos of wine bottles, bills, tax records all fully text searchable after they are uploaded to Evernote servers (Evernote premium.) Curious if anyone knows if Microsoft has OCR processing working their back-end data?

One of the benefits to switch to OneNote is that it's HPPA compliant for those healthcare professionals out there who may want to go to a paperless system. Evernote does not comply here.

OneNote's OCR is just okay. Sometimes it is downright hilarious. This morning, I was searching through some journal articles I'd saved for something I remembered reading about ion-solvation. OneNote just wasn't coming up with the quote I half-recalled, so I ended up searching for it manually. I found it, finally, and just for grins, copied that bit of text out of the image to see what OneNote thought it was. Apparently, OneNote thought the article was about ion *salvation,* which gave me a giggle but was not so useful in finding the information I was after.

Funny - I had to look up ion-solvation to see what it was. My browser even thinks it's misspelled. A thought is that Microsoft is ensuring it's a "common" word in their OCR process. Probably not so good for technical journals.

Luckily I don't store too much technical jargon AND currently I'm not making the switch to OneNote as Evernote is working for me quite well - especially from an OCR perspective - I have a LOT of data in there.

Hey, there's no tool for migrating from OneNote to something else at this time, but to be fair the tool for migrating from Evernote wasn't official. If people want to get out of OneNote, I'm sure someone will make a tool for the job.

Thanks you so much for the article. Transfer of files from Evernote to OneNote was really smooth. I am able to organize files easily in OneNote and move them from one work book to another using Drag and Drop method.

Just a small suggestion: Heading "What You Need to Migrate from OneNote to Evernote" is little confusing. It should be the other way.

I am trying to go from evernote to Onenote , but having problems with a few things.

1. You can't delete notebooks in the Mac app and the help says you must go to onenote.com to do so, but when I go to that site and try to view notebooks using Safari it states "sorry we ran into a problem". Does it work with Safari?

2. I am trying to add a few alias emails so I can use me@onenote.com but it says the emails are already in use, but I do not have them attached to any other accounts.

The Windows machine I have access to is work, and it doesn't seem to have the correct .NET framework level. I may have to try the IFTTT script. Since most of my notes in EverNote are pictures of bills I entered in WheresGeorge.com, letting me know where I spent them, it wouldn't be that big a deal to transfer when I enter the where spent info into WG. If I ever do… I'm thinking OneNote will be used for more stuff in general.

Ok I tried to transfer some notebooks and it works like a charm.
The only (big) issue is the sharing from a webpage on mobile: it takes only the title and URL, while Evernote takes ALL the webpage.

Anyway using 1N on a Surface Pro 2 is far more satisfying than using EN ;-)

Anonymous

November 15, 2015 at 8:14 am

I won't use apps with proprietary / app-specific data formats as my data repository. What if the company shuts down? Download and re-org everything again? As well, the chance of OneNote remaining free and unlimited is same as OneDrive - if you know what I mean.

Instead, I organize pretty much all my data (calendar, financial, lists, references, etc., etc.) using spreadsheets. While not as snazzy,“.xls“ can be read by many different 'office' apps. And by setting up a table of contents and linking both ways to individual pages (tabs) - it's easy enough to use a single file (workbook) as a personal data repository. My one file has 150+ tabs. Password protected (encrypted), backed up, and synced to cloud, my file is both private and 'universally' accessible. I don't need MS or Google or anybody else scanning my data repository.

Good article and comments. I have always struggled with lists as I could have finished the task by the time I have created a list but also need an easy way to make a note of something.
I searched for an app that links with everything else so an email that I don't have time for can be scheduled and categorised quickly after the first read. And without opening an app and copy the message etc.
Not sure either will do this but have trailed any do with limited success.
Further suggestions welcome.

The main point that people here do not get from your article is that OneNote is far superior for organisation. Evernote is just 1 big bucket that you dump all your notes into, which is why it has such extensive search capabilities, which you need because every note becomes a needle in the haystack to look for.
I also migrated from EN to 1N a few months ago principally because EN's editor was so poor, and because I found EN to be unreliable. I had to reinstall EN several times on advice from the support team. But each time my internal links were broken! So those issues were gone when I started using 1N. But then I discovered an even greater advantage: the possibility to organise things properly, transparently, logically & not having to look with all sorts of different types of search queries to find that note. I can just go right to it now. And on the rare occasion that I do need to use 1N's search capability it is more than adequate.
Furthermore, I have become an avid user of tables which I use extensively, with a lot of my individual notes as attachments to a master table (based on my own template). That, in combination with sections, notebooks and the ease of use of templates, makes life for me muuuuuch simpler. EN has its tags, but each time you want to assign one to a note you have to go though that tag list. It just sucks.
I admit that EN's web clipper is superior to 1N's, but with this year's improved 1N clipper (v2), EN's clipper was no longer that deal breaker for me that is was before. EN can do a lot of things, but very often it amounts to a workaround.

I have used Evernote and OneNote. Both have their pros and cons. Right now I use Google Keep because it fits my needs at home. If I were to choose, I would go with OneNote because it is not quite as complicated as Evernote.

I switched to OneNote two years ago and never looked back. No more program crashes after updates of Evernote, in control over your storage (local or web) and convenient back-ups to an additonal locations with versioning. Sorry to read that people almost comment before giving a program a decent chance. OneNote really improved over the years. The only thing that should improve is the webclipper (it's there folks, but not as nice as Clearly).

I use Evernote for my personal notes and OneNote at work. While I think OneNote is ok, it's totally ridiculous to suggest that OneNote replaces Evernote. There's no web clipper for a start and that's just the beginning of the lack of features, rubbish phone app etc.

Wow. I've rarely read an article whereby so much was omitted in regards to an app. I would go as far as saying I couldn't even compare the two. Worlds apart in so many ways. I can't imagine why anyone would even think about swtiching?
If you get a 'heavy' evernote preimum user that uses all the features and leverages off IFTTT and Zapier then you have a very different story.
I've looked at OneNote a few times and it feels so dated and uninspiring that I sigh repeatedly. Evernote is light years ahead.

OneNote works with IFTTT, and the web clipper now extracts articles and has a bunch of other features. I'm happy you've got a program that works for you, though, because that's what this is all about. Keep enjoying Evernote, it's awesome in many ways, I'm just really happy I found OneNote because for me it's better in every way.

I use Evernote for almost ten years now (back then it was blue and did not have an elephant!) I am quite sure that OneNote would not deal as smoothly with my 16k notes, consisting of web clips, PDF files and my own notes.

I agree on all your points about Onenote being better as a standalone , but far more apps integrate with Evernote. For example, I use Boxer for email and a quick swipe right puts an email into Evernote. Onenote has to do some catching up before I give up on Evernote.

Good article Justin, but it leaves out a lot of Evernote (especially Premium Evernote) features. Those features may not be of value to you, or in the way you organize, but may be to others.
How about coming up with a comparison matrix so everyone can see which app can do what. That way no one will cut over to One Note, only to find that a critical EN function has been lost.

Fair enough man, I'm just happy with the change and think other people should at least consider it. I might consider doing some sort of one-to-one comparision, but I really think people mostly just need to try it out for themselves.

I use a combination of both. For actual note-taking, project management, blog writing, etc., I use OneNote. I prefer EverNote for use as more of a knowledge base where I send articles or whatever I want to keep and also to organize old files that I don't use but need/want to hold on to.

I tried using OneNote and found it to be messy and less organized than Evernote (just like Office is compared to Google Docs). Evernote is cleaner and makes the software get out of the way and the web interface is awesome. The web clipper, Clearly, and the integration with other apps and devices is also excellent.

As for forgetting to do things, i have reminders set for notes so that I get an alert to work on things.

I would have agreed with you two years ago, but in that time I feel like Evernote on Mac has become cluttered. OneNote was a breath of fresh air for me in this regard, once you hide the ribbon at least.

Justin Pot is a technology journalist based in Portland, Oregon. He loves technology, people and nature – and tries to enjoy all three whenever possible. You can chat with Justin on Twitter, right now.